Revolutionary DNA-Based Approach to Map Wiring of Whole Brain

[TECH NEWS]

A team of neuroscientists has proposed a new and potentially revolutionary way of obtaining a neuronal connectivity map (the “connectome”) of the whole brain of the mouse. Details were set forth October 23 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. The team, led by Professor Anthony Zador, Ph.D., of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, aims to provide a comprehensive account of neural connectivity. At present the only method for obtaining this information with high precision relies on examining individual cell-to-cell contacts (synapses) in electron microscopes. But such methods are slow, expensive and labor-intensive. Zador and colleagues instead propose to exploit high-throughput DNA sequencing to probe the connectivity of neural circuits at the resolution of single neurons. “Our method renders the connectivity problem in a format in which the data are readable by currently available high-throughput genome sequencing machines,” says Zador. “We propose to do this via a process we’re now developing, called BOINC: the barcoding of individual neuronal connections.”

 October 23, 2012, ScienceDaily / Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory